Soul-Aligned Living: Embracing Hardships as Part of the Journey

A personal reflection on cultivating a soul aligned life when coming from impoverished origins.

A huge part of cultivating a life rooted in soul alignment is acknowledging where you come from and your present state of being—no matter how hard it is to look at.

When I migrated from Jamaica at the age of 19, I was mostly unconscious of my cultural roots, socioeconomic background, and the current socioeconomic status I lived under. I was a schoolgirl, attending a prestigious high school due to my success in the high school placement examinations and my parents’ investments in my education. I was wrapped in the world of seeking to advance my education to access a better quality of life. The thing is, I never fully understood the socioeconomic reality of life in Jamaica. Aside from the news and overhearing conversations of adults discussing the struggles, no one had ever had a serious conversation with me about what it would really look like to escape the poverty of Jamaica.

My mother lived off the grid in a low-infrastructure area, coming from a farming family before it became trendy on the internet. It didn’t have the glamour that first-world aesthetics often afford those venturing into homesteading or the off-grid lifestyle. Both her parents lived their entire lives rurally.

My father was also born in Kingston but moved to rural areas, where his mother struggled to make a living amidst economic difficulties and relationship issues.

Both of my parents came from rural backgrounds and had lived through the realities of poor-quality infrastructure and building materials, limited tools, little to no governmental aid, little to no access to quality healthcare (let alone holistic care), and a reliance on ancestral knowledge of the earth, which had been fractured due to colonization.

I learned about these roots only when I returned to Jamaica in 2020 and embarked on a radical and unexpected journey of confronting the challenges of Jamaica with children.

Upon returning to Jamaica at the age of 24, a mother of two—my first child was three years old, and I was pregnant with my second—accompanied by my expat husband, I was still partially unaware of my roots. However, I had started my journey of decolonizing my mindset and my spiritual understanding of The Most High Source, or God, which gave me some leverage in navigating life in Jamaica without being heavily pulled under the cultural collective frequencies of poverty and religious indoctrination rooted in our tiny island—especially among those of us from impoverished backgrounds. Even so, I didn’t fully escape these energetic waves of collective fear, poverty mindset, and lack. I was scared of what could happen being in my home country. My subconscious fears came toppling to the forefront. This period was especially difficult because I had entered marriage and motherhood in America—a very different socioeconomic landscape—and returning to Jamaica made it hard to feel safe in my body.

After all, I had left Jamaica with the mindset that it was a hard place to survive, full of violence and with little hope for the beautiful, aesthetically pleasing life I had seen so many modern, spiritual, eco-friendly, mindful-living-focused parents and families share about on social media while in America.

I yearned for a reality that, deep down, I didn’t believe I could manifest in Jamaica.

The space I was in during this phase pointed to an energetic state of lack, rooted in generations of poverty. Staying in this mindset could not manifest realities rooted in the high-frequency visions I was receiving of my future life. The truth is, manifestation is as much a practical process of confronting the personal, socioeconomic, and political limiting realities you face, as it is about the psycho-spiritual work of visualizing, scripting, affirming, clearing blocked energies, etc.

At this point in my life, I was overly dependent on the theory and mental aspects of manifestation and soul-aligned living. I was still holding onto a first-world narrative of what that would look like. I was running from the physical work of having to get my hands dirty and navigate my impoverished background. I didn’t like the aesthetic of third world living in Jamaica, and I didn’t like this sudden shift that forced me to confront my intergenerational lack of stability. But, Great Spirit and the Universal energies of alignment knew that in order to shift to my embodied state of soul-aligned living, all my shit would have to come to the surface. This is where the deep shadow work began.

I was being called to embrace the more practical sides of understanding my roots and breaking out of cycles of poverty. This meant I had to now apply all the lessons on spiritual living, healing, and manifestation I had learned in America to my developing country landscape.

I had no blueprint, but I had knowledge of astrology that I pulled on for clarity.

I had so many questions and doubts—Why was everything falling apart? Why was everything so difficult? Would my marriage come to an end? Life was really testing the hell out of me, and it was changing me rapidly into someone I didn’t recognize. Gone was the woman who was all love and light—the one who was pampered by the provisions of a husband with far more income-earning opportunities, allowing me to rest into a privileged state of being a stay-at-home mother in America. Now, I resembled the mother that many of the women in my bloodline had to be—the ones worried about money, basic survival, and caring for their children in a developing country landscape.

Despite the hardships, I surrendered through it all. It wasn’t easy, but it brought immense character growth and has delivered me to a space in my life where I feel the soul alignment of my life realities. With the physical proof of alignment, I’ve also received divine confirmation through studying my human design and astrology charts.

In an upcoming exclusive post, I’ll be sharing specific details of what I experienced and the spiritual insights I gained through studying my charts regarding intergenerational trauma, bloodline karma, and the soul-aligned path of facing poverty-related challenges in Jamaica.

To journey deeper with me and access these exclusive personal and psycho-spiritual blogs, which include astrological insights about my journey in Jamaica, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. In doing so, you offer tangible support in exchange for more blogs, providing deeper insights into the journey of soul-aligned living from my personal experiences and testimonies.

If you are seeking one-on-one guidance in exploring your own astrological charts, you may work with me. Visit my website, below, , to access the details of my soul alignment and karmic patterns analysis readings.

https://workwithmakeda.carrd.co/

To access my free guidebook on how astrology and human design can be used to empower your journey of self awareness and development, visit here.

Thank you so much for joining me on this journey by choosing to tune into my virtual sharing.

Check out my latest YouTube video, where I share more on this topic of soul-aligned living.

If you enjoy my content and would like to send general love donations or gratitude tips, you can send them to my Cash App: $MakedaofJamaica. Every contribution is deeply valued, as it helps sustain my family.